Huawei brings SDN into the cloud

Mar 20, 2017

Kathy Gibson reports from CeBit in Hannover – The increasing “cloudification” of the IT environment continues with Huawei’s introduction today of an all-cloud network architecture, plus cloud-based SDN-WAN.
The All-Cloud Network for enterprise spans the whole network, from core to edge, delivering ubiquitous connections, and open cloud platform and social technology applications specific to the enterprise’s enterprise vertical.
The new technology aims to unlock digital transformation, says Kevin Hu, president of the switch and enterprise product line at Huawei.
Industry 4.0 has improved the efficiencies and quality in traditional industries, Hu explains.
But new emerging industries will rely on big data, Internet off Things (IoT0 and intelligence, he adds. Meanwhile, cloud and IoT have the potential to affect the macroeconomic economy to the extent of increasing GDP growth.
These three pillars – ubiquitous connections, and open cloud platform and social technology applications – for the basis of the 3rrd platform, Hu says.
Ubiquitous connections are enabled when the data centre fully connected people, things, data and applications in campus, branch and IoT scenarios.
An open cloud platform allows for rapid service deployment and simplified operations and management (O&M), with centralised scheduling of resources and open APIs.
Social technology industry application use cloud-based big data analytics to provide rich industry-specific SaaS services, opening application and data to be shared between enterprises and users.
Huawei’s All-Cloud Network provides six cloud-enabled solutions to reconstruct networks in different scenarios.
CloudFabric helps enterprises build and efficient and open cloud data centre network. CloudDCI helps to build a smart on-demand data centre interconnection network. CloudCampus manages the network throughout its lifecycle. CloudEPN provides on-demand value-added network services for enterprises.. Edge Computing IoT (EC-IoT) meets predictive maintenance needs and enables digital transformation in vertical industries, allowing companies to build proactive and self-immune systems.
The new SD-WAN, launched today, offers enterprise application-aware, cost-effective on-demand cloud-managed leased line. Huawei believes it will help to reduce the costs and accelerate service provisioning, so companies can respond quickly to changing environments.
While enterprises are migrating to the cloud, they are finding that the management of traditional leased lines is expensive, while the lines often don’t cope with new requirements.
“To cope with service cloudification and industry digitalisation, enterprise leased lines require higher bandwidth, simplified operations and management (O&M) and quicker response to service changes,” Hu says.
The Huawei SD-WAN helps companies to build application-aware on-demand leased lines. It offers online service subscription, provisioning, O&M, adjustment and optimisation.
Benefits of cloud-based SDN-WAN include faster deployment of networking services, Hu explains. It also allows for flexible link bundling
The SD-WAN supports a range of customer premises equipment (CPE) types, and combines a variety of leased lines.
Products that enable the SD-WAN are open. The AR1610-x6 is an x86-based NFV platform for on-demand services. The AR169EGW – is for branch deployment. It is a fat gigabit wireless router with 802.11ac wave 2, and can support up to 128 simultaneous users.
Cloud Campus, also launched today, offers better visibility and manageability of the physical networking layer.
From 20 000 an 1-million devices can be managed more efficiently, allowing for hybrid management and smooth migration.
“You can manage huge networks with just a few people, Hu says. “The key factor is the efficiency that the Cloud Platform allows.”
The solution is also fast to deploy, offering simpler administration and richer applications.
Products enabling the Cloud Campus include GE access switches, 10GE aggregation switches, and ENP-optimised switches. On the edge, products cater to variety of use cases, including lightweight distributed WiFi access points (APs), dense WiFi APs, and indoor-optimised APs.